This article examines the link between fifteen national parliaments and decision-making in the EU Council of Ministers. The main purpose is to provide a comparative account of EU Affairs Committees and the national advisory processes of scrutiny and co-ordination that occur before a national government takes an official policy position in the Council. However, the variation that exists among the fifteen member states also raises the question of what explains it. In the second half of the article, it is argued that explanations of the variation should start from the complementary aspects of major interdisciplinary schools of thought such as culture theory, institutionalism and rational choice. This leads to a number of interesting new research questions.

This chapter argues that the debate about the proper relationship between member states and EU institutions usually pits those who favour emphasising intergovernmental principles against those who think that the Union must have an increased element of supranationalism. One result of a stalemate between these two positions is that the EU has developed into a hybrid regime. However, an empirical examination of recent debates in four important policy areas conducted by the authors reveals that member states often take a third position, incrementalism, which is a step-wise process characterised by advocating small policy reforms without really altering the hybrid. The main drawback of the incrementalism position is that it has only a vague notion of the need for and possibility of representative democracy.

In this article, we use a new data set describing governments, political parties and institutions to make an explicit comparison between Western Europe (WE) and Central Eastern Europe (CEE) in the investigation of three different topical issues found in the coalition literature, namely, coalition formation (that is, which factors affect who forms the winning coalitions), the number of cabinet members (that is, what affects the number of ministers in a cabinet) and cabinet duration (that is, which factors affect how long a new government lasts). Our findings indicate that, regardless of all the discussions about how CEE is different from WE because of the post-communist heritage or the volatility of voters in the CEE region, structural attributes such as the size and number of political parties are important determinants of coalition formation and cabinet duration patterns in both the West and the East. In fact, precisely because of the unsettled nature of CEE party politics, structural attributes tend to matter even more in the East.

Coalition government among different political parties is the way most European democracies are governed. Traditionally, the study of coalition politics has been focused on Western Europe. Coalition governance in Central Eastern Europe brings the study of the full coalition life-cycle to a region that has undergone tremendous political transformation, but which has not been studied from this perspective. The volume covers Bulgaria, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. It provides information and analyses of the coalition life-cycle, from pre-electoral alliances to coalition formation and portfolio distribution, governing in coalitions, the stages that eventually lead to government termination, and the electoral performance of coalition parties. In Central Eastern Europe, few single-party cabinets form and there have been only a few early elections. The evidence provided shows that coalition partners in the region write formal agreements (coalition agreements) to an extent that is similar to the patterns that we find in Western Europe, but also that they adhere less closely to these contracts. While the research on Western Europe tends to stress that coalition partners emphasize coalition compromise and mutual supervision, there is more evidence of 'ministerial government' by individual ministers and their parties. There are also some systems where coalition governance is heavily dominated by the prime minister. No previous study has covered the full coalition life-cycle in all of the ten countries with as much detail. Systematic information is presented in 10 figures and in more than one hundred tables.

Earlier chapters have investigated politics along the coalition life-cycle in our ten countries. In this chapter, we summarize the main patterns and we compare among the ten cases. We also look at how our findings contrast with the general patterns that are known from the literature on coalition politics, in particular those that we find in Western Europe.

The Comparative Parliamentary Democracy project examines West European parliamentary politics from a principal–agent perspective. The project involves thirty-five scholars from Western Europe and the Americas. It has made both conceptual and empirical contributions in the fields of comparative politics, parliamentary democracy in general and coalition politics in particular. In this report, the project leaders present the project, its ‘structured collaboration’ approach and share some observations on the practice of conducting a large-scale cross-national project.